Q&A: Vision of MDS

Zafar Anjum |
Aug. 15, 2013

‘Process once and distribute multiple times’ is the vision of Tech Mahindra’s Managed Data Services, explains Global Head – BFSI, Ravi Vasantraj. It is a breakthrough in the sense that a longstanding problem facing international financial institutions can now be resolved and offered as a platform service.

‘Process once and distribute multiple times’ is the vision of Tech Mahindra’s Managed Data Services, explains Global Head – BFSI, Ravi Vasantraj. It is a breakthrough in the sense that a longstanding problem facing international financial institutions can now be resolved and offered as a platform service.

What is the UBS-Tech Mahindra breakthrough "managed data service"? What is its significance for both the partners?

Much of financial reference data (including Instrument Static, Pricing, Corporate Actions and Taxation) - used by financial institutions requires extensive cleansing, massaging, enrichment and validation including significant manual intervention before being deemed usable for business users. Inaccurate and/ or incomplete data often results in a high number of trades being rejected, significant regulatory penalties and loss of reputation.

On top of that, there is massive duplication of resources, systems, data, etc across the trading desks, wealth management, asset management, risk management, research/ analytics, back office clearing/settlement/reconciliation and custodian services of banks due multiple silos of reference data present across the landscape of a Financial Institution. The total scale of data management operations and the ensuing total cost of ownership is often several times the cost of data itself.

Tech Mahindra has become the first major IT services company to offer "golden copy of reference data" as a service which has been cleansed of errors and caters business validations/ rules of each of its clients. The vision of MDS is essentially "process once and distribute multiple times". It is a breakthrough in the sense that a longstanding problem facing international financial institutions (FIs) can now be resolved and offered as a platform service. Standardised and non-standardised data can now be used within the entire financial institution whose individual departments no longer need to keep large IT and Operations team and maintain large and complex software applications and underlying hardware platform to cater to their data needs.

Tech Mahindra's MDS is offered as a platform-as-a-service. Tech Mahindra does not compete with the original sources of such data, which are the exchanges and the feeds offered by established data providers such as Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters. What we do is cleanse, enrich, validate and prepare a Golden Copy of data as a hosted service - all in a single Business Process as a Service offering. MDS caters to both standardised instruments like equities, bonds, indices, etc. as well more exotic non-standardised instruments such as credit default swaps, collaterised debt obligations and the like. The key functional aspects of the MDS comprise: